There are more than 22,000 funeral homes in the United States, with many being independently or family owned. Many of these independent funeral homes have processes for managing tasks and transactions relating to funerals that have developed over decades of business, though often these processes fail to leverage modern technologies effectively. As a result, the execution of a perfect funeral often relies upon dry erase boards, whiteboards, handwritten paper order forms, fax machines, and telephone calls. For example, in many funeral homes the planning, preparation, and scheduling of funeral services are managed by writing out tasks on a whiteboard and checking off or filling in information as tasks are completed. The whiteboard could include information about a reserved location for visitation, police escorts for a procession, a tailor hired to prepare burial garments, or even a hired hairdresser. While such a process is often adequate, there is a significant chance for error due to smudged or accidentally erased information, information written into the wrong column, or simply forgetting to add or remove a task or related information.
As another example, in many funeral homes the management and tracking of transactions between funeral homes and third parties that provide goods and services relating to a funeral is inconsistent or even non-existent. A funeral home might have several different vendors that provide concrete vaults for burial services. One vendor might accept orders and provide updates by email, another might accept orders via fax and provide updates by mail, yet another might accept order via phone and provide no updates unless requested. With no consistency in the manner that each vendor accepts and communicates about orders, the funeral home is in a position where it must adapt its processes to match an inconsistent and unreliable set of third party processes. However, it is not uncommon for a funeral home to be waiting on an update for shipping, having forgotten that the vendor they ordered the vault from does not provide shipping updates. Even worse, in some cases a funeral home may believe that they ordered a vault via phone or email when in fact the order was never received or recorded by the vendor, and, due to inconsistent practices in providing order updates, the error may not be realized until it is too late to have a vault ready for the burial ceremony.
What is needed, therefore, is an improved system for managing tasks and transactions related to death care.